The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

To Hell and Back: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Update: Here's a link to an interview with Charles Pellegrino that aired on May 26, 2016 on the John Batchelor Show.

I thank Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus for posting anexpanded version of this piece on its website on June 1, 2016.

“To Hell and Back” is a phrase that can bear a pretty heavy
metaphorical load when it comes to talking about the atomic bombings of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima.It’s also the
title of a book by Charles Pellegrino that is the subject of both of my pieces, and which I quote extensively at AT.

Pellegrino’s book is a moving and grueling close-up look at
the horrors experienced by the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both on the day
of the bombing and in the days and years afterward.I have the heart of a dried-up raisin but
even I got a little teary in places.

There are few opportunities for inspiring “triumph of the
human spirit” narratives amid the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.The bombings were titanic, apocalyptic events
that mock human scale and comprehension.Pellegrino depicts dazed “ant-trails” of survivors threading through the
instantaneously blasted landscapes and past heaps of the dead, dying, and
horrifically maimed in the shadow of an eight-mile high radioactive cloud. Fate
and the desperate efforts of the rescuers saved some, but many lives literally
disintegrated in seconds, minutes, days, and years after the bombs were
dropped.

Near the hypocenter, the experience of death was
overwhelming and random in a dehumanizing way.For some, it came down to the decision to wear a white shirt or a dark
shirt.The white shirt might reflect the
intense, instantaneous radiation of the blast with remarkable efficacy; a black
shirt absorbed the radiation and incinerated the wearer.

The bottom line for many survivors is that their families,
their communities, their city, most of the world they knew, their health, their spiritual equilibrium, even their social status had been annihilated in an event of overwhelming
horror. The survivors experienced physical and mental trauma; ostracization;
guilt; shame; and lingering illness.

Nevertheless, Pellegrino does document instances of courage,
compassion, and ingenuity and people sustaining their humanity through acts of
love and sacrifice.

An inspiration for
the title of the book is the “double” hibakusha,
people who experienced and survived both the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.One survivor of Hiroshima goes
back home to Nagasaki and tells his co-workers of the awful weapon he had
experienced; he warns them if they see a blinding flash—the pika—they must use it as a signal they
have a few seconds to seek shelter before the don—the crash, the massive shock wave created by the bomb, arrives.

And so “duck and cover” was born.

A document of human horror, To Hell and Back is also a memorial to the survivors and their
struggle to restore sanity and meaning to their lives with little outside
help.And it also sounds like a
backhanded reference to Pellegrino’s own travails at the hands of the nuclear
denialists.

His book was originally published in 2010 as The Last Train to Hiroshima.But the book—and Pellegrino himself-- became
a piñata for indignant veterans, nuclear denialists, and atomic bomb fanboys.

The relatively substantive problem with Last Train was that a guy, who claimed to have been part of the
squadron of planes escorting the Enola
Gay and provided several pages of gripping detail, had made up his
story.

Pellegrino acknowledged the error and retracted, but it
became clear that the intention of his opponents was not to correct errors; it
was discredit Pellegrino, the book, and the idea that the sufferings of the
victims should be remembered when considering the bomb and its legacy.

The attacks on the book went beyond scientific nitpicking
along the lines of “could a human really be vaporized by an atomic bomb?” and
snowballed into attacks on Pellegrino, his credentials, and his integrity.The New York Times provided a platform for
the anti-Pellegrino crowd, helping stampede the publisher, Henry Holt and
Company, into withdrawing Last Train to
Hiroshima.

The battle continued on various message boards;Pellegrino held his own, especially after it
transpired that the New York Times and other media outlets, while pursuing
their ambitions to serve as journalistic gatekeepers and bring a literary
malefactor to justice, had themselves been gulled by
a series of malicious forgeries supplied by Pellegrino’s enemies.

The attack on Last
Train appears to have been very much of a piece, both in themes and protagonists,
with longstanding U.S. government and military veteran groups' efforts to suppress the
more disturbing issues and viewpoints surrounding the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On the scientific side, the US government had a vested
interest in suppressing the details of pervasive and persistent radiation
effects that undercut the usability of nuclear weapons and threatened to
deliver a gigantic bill for human and environmental remediation.

Here’s one of the first important U.S. military
documentaries on Hiroshima/Nagasaki, A
Tale of Two Cities from 1946.There’s a lot of image management going on; for instance, the Nagasaki bombardier missed the designated bull's eye by 3 miles, which is spun as a judicious decision to
drop the nuke right between two major targets to git ‘em both!

What’s very interesting is the very early interest in
poo-pooing radiation effects.Physicists
suspected from the outset that radioactive contamination from a
nuclear blast was a pervasive, unmanageable problem; the Pentagon has always
been, in a rather unscientific and immoral way, committed to advertising the
fiction that contamination issues are manageable and the health impacts
minimal.

The movie pushes the “clean blast” story (bomb detonated
above ground to minimize fallout, which is I think a bit of a stretch; some scientists decided a ground detonation would soak up too much of the shock wave to yield a psychologically satisfying degree of devastation & proposed an airburst instead); presents the statement of a Jesuit priest that he worked in
Hiroshima with no ill effects after the attack; and offers the reassuring observation that that it was back to business as usual on the roads of Nagasaki after the massive radiation release: “people
using them without ill effects shortly after the explosion”.

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US military has been kept
busy in its crusade to assert the sanitary and housebroken character of nuclear
events.In 1954 it faced a particular
challenge when eggheads miscalculated the yield of the Castle Bravo shot, a sizable chunk of Bikini Atoll was vaporized into radioactive dust, the Lucky Dragon No. 5 got
contaminated, and Godzilla was born (no lie; read
it here).

Managing and covering up the consequences of atmospheric
nuclear releases is also very much a contemporary problem for the US, as I’ve
discussed in my
CounterPunch piece on the U.S. apparent coverup of the radiation problems
of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan,
which was contaminated offshore of Fukushima during post-earthquake/tsunami
rescue operations.

My piece picks apart the peacetime radiation effects issue in history, from one of
the most significant fallout events in U.S. history—in Albany, New York, of all
places!—and the Chernobyl disaster, in addition to Fukushima, to describe the
U.S. government “long war” on unfavorable radiation effects science and its concerted effort to minimize the accounting of radiation casualties to the absolute, irrefutable bare minumum.

The Reagan has never
been completely decontaminated, several hundred members of the crew and
other U.S. military personnel are suing for
compensation for medical issues, and the Reagan has been sitting in the naval base at Yokosuka for a
suspiciously long time for an aircraft carrier that’s supposed to be pivoting
all over the western Pacific at this crucial juncture (the USS Carl VinsonJohn Stennis out of San Diego & aircraft carriers transiting
from the Middle East are picking up the d*ck-swinging slack).

But Hiroshima/Nagasaki denialists are only peripherally
interested in issues of radiation effects.They want to suppress or minimize all accounts of human suffering in
order to pre-empt discussions of the morality of U.S. tactics in the ultimate
“good war”.

Like the coverup of radiation effects, feel-good denialism
has been a factor in attitudes toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the git-go.

Douglas MacArthur believed that the A-bomb got too much
credit, especially since it threatened to dilute the glory of Douglas
MacArthur’s victory in the Pacific, and his team devoted a significant effort
to poor-mouthing the strategic significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well
as dismissing the magnitude of human suffering it caused.In the words of MacArthur’s point man for
spinning the public health effects of the attacks, Crawford Sams, the A-bomb
was “a
poor killer”.

Milestones in U.S. denialism include MacArthur’s imposition of censorship on reporting from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the suppression
of gruesome footage of the medical consequences of the bombings, recorded
shortly after the surrender both by a Japanese newsreel company and the U.S.
Army’s own lavishly-funded Technicolor documentary unit.

Erik Barnouw of Columbia University edited the two hours and
forty five minutes of the Japanese footage into a 15 minute piece shown on US
television in 1969:

Some of the U.S. Army footage, known as the McGovern footage
after the unit director, found its way onto the Internet:

Be warned before clicking: these two videos, especially the
McGovern footage, are essentially medical atrocity videos.

But also, if you can sit through the videos, you notice that
to the amateur observer much of the movie documents horrific burn trauma that,
aside from footage of people whose eyes got melted by the flash, doesn’t look
demonstrably and exclusively like radiation effects.

It just looks awful and inhumane.And that’s probably why it was suppressed.

Key punctuation points in the war against humanitarian and
pacifist attempts to detail the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the
campaigns against plans for a revisionist setting for the Enola Gay exhibition
at the Smithsonian Institute in 1994 and 2003.

Many of the same protagonists emerged with the same themes to
savage Pellegrino in 2010.

One of the interesting and melancholy developments is that
the denialist campaign to minimize the human consequences of the atomic
bombings seems to be losing some of its heat in 2016.Not necessarily because understanding,
reflection, and compassion (in Japanese omoiyari,
a concept embraced by some hibakusha
that Pellegrino celebrates in his book) are finally prevailing; it’s because
the World War II generation is dying and it’s easier to ignore a bygone horror
when the living, human legacy of injury and suffering is no longer before our
eyes.

The good news is that Pellegrino’s book is back, new and
improved, expanded, documented, fact-checked, and footnoted and published by
Rowman & Littlefield thanks to the efforts of Mark Selden of Cornell.You can do the publisher a solid by buying
the book direct from the R&L website.And for the most complete and authoritative reporting on
nuclear/radiation issues in Japan, bookmark Selden’s Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus
e-journal.